I analyzed more than a million bitcoin tweets. Here’s what that looks like

I recently got my hands on more than 1.3 million tweets, all mentioning bitcoin or creator Satoshi Nakamoto, spanning the entire month of February 2014. My goal was to get a sense of who’s actually interested in bitcoin (enough to tweet about it, at least) and to see how activity on Twitter tracked with big news stories.

Here’s what I found. Click on any image for a larger version.

(Disclaimer: I’m neither a statistician nor a programmer, so I used relatively simple tools for analysis and worked with companies on other aspects. Gnip, which is now part of Twitter, supplied the data. I used Chartio’s cloud-based analytics service for much of the quantitative analysis and some of the visualizations. I used Google Fusion Tables for the Marc Andreessen graphs, Tableau for the analysis of news content and AlchemyAPI analyzed the Mt. Gox tweets for sentiment.)

Who’s tweeting about Bitcoin

All told, 333,144 unique accounts posted messages related to bitcoin. But not all accounts are created equal. Some are clearly spam accounts or other types of bots — thousands had posted between zero and one tweets — while others seemingly constantly churn out the latest Bitcoin rates and new items. Here are the top 10 most-active accounts for February.